Edgar Rice Burroughs and Masculine Narrative

From The Brussels Journal, August27, 2009

Contemporary popular culture is as jejune as contemporary politics: strangled by political correctness and by contempt for form and etiquette, it eats away like acid at what remains of courtesy and memory.  But the past of popular culture – in literature and the movies – has much nourishment to offer.  One of the most popular authors of the Twentieth Century, Edgar Rice Burroughs (1875 – 1950), had a keen intuition about the health of the body politic and the positive relation of a vital culture to its founding traditions.  The Author of Tarzan (1912) and its many sequels, the inventor of the extraterrestrial sword-and-sandals romance, ex-cavalryman, admirer of the Apache and the Sioux, anti-Communist, anti-Nazi, self-publishing millionaire entrepreneur, religious skeptic, “Big-Stick” patriot, Southern California real estate baron, sixty-year-old Pacific-Theater war correspondent, Burroughs has, with a few ups and downs, maintained an audience both from his authorial debut in 1912 to the present day, nearly sixty years after his death.  Burroughs has a place in the culture wars, standing as he does for the opposite of almost everything advocated by the elites of the new liberal-totalitarian order.  I offer, in what follows, a modest assessment of Burroughs’ work.

I recommend Burroughs, whose books saw translation in every European language, to parents of conservative temperament on the lookout for adolescent-appropriate reading matter to offer to their children, whether male or female it hardly matters.  If you are Latvian or Bulgarian, you may read Tarzan in your native tongue.  Please do…

I. A longtime teacher of Western Literature, Classics-in-Translation, and American Novel courses at the university level (in California, Michigan, and Upstate New York) and a professing paleoconservative, I am fiercely dedicated to high culture and the Great Books.  I confess, however, to a sneaking fondness for some of the outstanding – even some of the less-than-outstanding – popular literature of the first half of the Twentieth Century. . . . Read the whole article